How to add a background in photoshop?

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1

Note, that this is about how to “add” a background not to remove it.
About removing the background there are plenty of tutorials, I guess adding back a background is so simple that doesn’t worth more than a click or two, therefore I can’t find it in a tutorial.

I removed the background from an image, a photograph, following the very nice tutorial on sitepoint.
http://www.sitepoint.com/print/masking-techniques-photoshop

However, the tutorial ends when you have the object isolated.
Now, I want to put a solid background, i.e. black color.

So, I thought, and adjustment layer “solid color” will do the job for sure. But it doesn’t. If I add a solid color adjustment layer, I get a layer that totally covers my other layer. I mean, it turns totally black. Playing with fill or opacity doesn’t help neither. Either I get my phograph with the chess-like background (i.e. no background) or I get the picture totally black !

It must be the simplest thing or something I’m missing, please forgive my newbieness.

2

Just put the layer with your isolated object OVER the layer with background.
Or select Layer/New/Background From Layer (while your layer with solid color fill is active) and it’ll be changed into background, landing on the very bottom of the layer “stack”.

3

So, what I did was:
Add a new adjustment layer with full color, selected black.
Then, on this new layer, I selected Layer/New/Layer from background, and this made the trick !

Thanks !

4

You can just turn any layer into background and then fill it with black (Alt+Del if black is a foreground color).
I’m glad it worked for you :slight_smile: